vanBasco's Karaoke Player is a standard MIDI file player with full screen Karaoke display for IBM PCs or compatibles running Microsoft Windows 95/98/ME or Windows 2000/NT 4. Its interface is designed to be both efficient and easy to use.

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Steps

1

Choose the song you want to play. Here, you specify which song to play, select which outputs to display, and also access some special functions like "shuffle" or "scan". The main window mimics to a large extent, video or music tape players and works pretty much the same. You can be intuitive about getting around this window.

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2

To load a song, create a playlist or double-click the sound file in Windows Explorer (or drag & drop onto a window of the player). A new playlist identified as "(default)" will be created. If there is already a playlist entitled "(default)", its contents will be replaced (if you want to keep that playlist, simply rename it via the Playlist Window so it won't be overwritten later).

3

Learn the Player Control Buttons.

To play -- click the blue PLAY button. While playing, this button will become a PAUSE button, for temporary stops.

To 'rewind' to an earlier part of the song while playing, select the REW and don’t release the click until you have ‘rewound’ enough. You can judge that by observing the visual display of the song counter and the time/total values.

To skip forward to a later part of the song, select and hold down (click delayed release) the FW button.

4

Alternatively, you can move around in the song by dragging the little blue timing bar along the time scale underneath the main play buttons.

PREV and NEXT buttons refer to earlier and later songs in a playlist of songs.

STOP stops the playing of the song or playlist. If you push PLAY then, playing will start in the beginning. (Use PAUSE if you want to stop play temporarily and then pick up where you left off.)

5

Create a Playlist.

To create or edit a playlist, select the PLAYLIST button in the lower left of the main window. This will bring up the Playlist Window. You can also select which windows you wish to see while playing. Choices are KARAOKE (for singing, if the current file comes with lyrics), OUTPUT (to see the detailed channel information), PIANO (real-time keyboard), and CONTROL (tempo, key, volume control setting).

These are toggle buttons to select on or off. Red means ON, black means OFF:

Autoplay ON causes dragged-and-dropped files to play instantly

Shuffle ON causes random re-order of the songs in the current playlist

Scan ON allows you to listen to just a single frame of each song (usually in the beginning of the song, by default ranging from 00:10 to 00:20; can be configured via the Setup Dialog). This is very useful for trying a series of files.

Repeat is actually a three-state option allowing to either repeat the current song, loop the whole playlist, or don’t repeat.

6

Use the Misc Buttons

Search (the magnifying glass, located in the upper right) -- clicking this icon will take you to the web page of vanBasco's MIDI Search, an Internet search engine for MIDI and Karaoke files.

Save As... (the diskette to the left of the magnifying glass) -- allows you to save the current file to a local drive.

Options (the note in the upper left corner) -- opens a menu which will allow you to access the setup dialog, toggle the playlist and the additional display windows, open the help file, etc. Note: Using this button will save the original MIDI file -- any changes made in the output window, such as muting a channel, or changing the tempo in the control window, will not be saved. However, you can save these changes to the playlist from within the control window.

7

Use the Quick Select Window

Click the file name (or press 'Q' on your computer's keyboard) to bring up the quick select window. Here, you can easily navigate to any song in the current playlist, which is very convenient for on-stage usage, for example. There are three ways to do this.

you can use the cursor keys.

you may enter the song number (provided that the song position display is activated)

you can type in the first few characters of the song name.

8

Once the desired song is highlighted, simply press the Return key to load that song. If you don't want to make any selection, you can dismiss the Quick Select Window by pressing Escape (Esc).

By the way, vanBasco's Karaoke Player can also be controlled via several other keyboard shortcuts.

vanBasco's Karaoke Player can be controlled via the following keyboard shortcuts:

keyboard shortcut alternative shortcut action

Space Bar Play / Pause

Escape (Esc) Stop playback

Ctrl + N F4 Next song in playlist

Ctrl + P F3 Previous song in playlist

Right Arrow Fast Forward

Left Arrow Rewind

+ Transpose up by one semitone

- Transpose down by one semitone

Num * > Increase tempo (speed)

Num / < Decrease tempo

[ lower volume (softer)

] increase volume (louder)

Ctrl+0 F2 Reset

Alt + Q F12 open Quick Select Window

Alt + F F11 toggle full screen karaoke

F1 Open help file table of contents

Alt + L Toggle Playlist Window

Alt + C Toggle Control Window

Alt + O Toggle MIDI Output Window

Alt + P Toggle Piano Window

Alt + K Toggle Karaoke Window

Ctrl + A Toggle Autoplay

Ctrl + S Toggle Shuffle

Ctrl + C Toggle Scan

Ctrl + R Toggle Repeat

ALT + S Open Setup Dialog

ALT + X Exit program

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Tips

To do Karaoke while running other apps, check "Always On Top" in the Karaoke window's context menu (click inside Karaoke window with right mouse button).

You can drag and drop files onto vanBasco's Karaoke Player from file managers like Windows Explorer.

If your files sound wrong, try setting the SYSEX delay in the setup dialog to a value greater than 30. If you encounter hanging notes during fast-forward or when pressing the Pause button, please enable "Reset On Pause".

If you encounter hanging notes or other sound abnormalities, change options in the setup dialog (click the note button in the top-left corner of the main window and choose "Setup..."). You might want to try changing the output device or reset mode. If you have severe problems, change some of the advanced settings.

For fullscreen Karaoke, either double-click inside the Karaoke window or choose "Full Screen" from the Karaoke window's context menu (right-click inside the Karaoke window to open the context menu).

You can easily customize the Karaoke window -- select fonts, colors, background image etc.-- using the setup dialog (click the note button in the top-left corner of the main program window and choose "Setup...").

Here are some tips that will help you get the most out of this program:

To mute or play solo one ore more channels, in the MIDI Output Window press the red and blue buttons, respectively.

You can randomly arrange all songs in the current playlist using the shuffle function (click to turn red the button SHUFFLE in upper right in main window).

Following some Tips & Tricks that should answer the most commonly asked questions. We've also added the Tip of the Session Dialog which will give you an extra hint every time you launch vanBasco's Karaoke Player. In addition, there is the troubleshooting section. Finally, vanBasco's Karaoke Player can be controlled via several keyboard shortcuts as well.

Choosing the Scan mode (click on SCAN in the main window) is handy for trying multiple files. You can specify the scan interval in the setup dialog.

vanBasco's Karaoke Player supports a number of keyboard shortcuts. Click here for a complete list.

You can quickly navigate to a particular song in the current playlist using the quick select window (in the main program window, click the file name or press 'Q' on your computer's keyboard)

Warnings

Problem: no MIDI device configured

Solution: MIDI devices can be configured via the Windows control panel (from the Start menu, choose Settings > Control Panel): double click the icon labeled "multimedia" (or click here to jump there directly), and go to the "device" tab. From there, you can add and configure MIDI devices (for detailed instructions, see the manual of your sound card or computer system or contact the support division of your sound card / computer manufacturer).

If you cannot get any MIDI devices to work, there is an alternative solution that works so long as the digital audio subsystem of your sound card is set up properly (if you can play files such as .wav or .mp3, then you know that the digital audio subsystem works). You can install what is called a "MIDI software synthesizer". This is a software component which emulates a MIDI device (i.e. a piece of hardware) in software and uses the digital audio subsystem of your sound card to produce the actual sound. (In fact, there are MIDI software synthesizers available that surpass their hardware counterparts in sound quality!) The only drawback is that you machine should not be very slow - most MIDI software synthesizers require a PC running at 200 MHz or higher. For a list of software synthesizers available on the web, see the following URL: http://www.vanBasco.com/swsynth.html